


And Life Goes On...

by sincehewaseighteen



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: A little, F/F, Implications of Terminal Illness, Implications of death, M/M, Mentions of Death, Mentions of hospitals, Mentions of terminal illness, Sad, You're prob gonna, cry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-15
Updated: 2017-09-15
Packaged: 2018-12-30 04:36:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,179
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12100851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sincehewaseighteen/pseuds/sincehewaseighteen
Summary: A girl is suffering from a terminal illness in hospital, and Harry Styles comes to visit and babbles on about his lovely husband Louis and his cat Monica.





	And Life Goes On...

**Author's Note:**

> The shortest oneshot I've ever made. It's been in my mind for a while.
> 
> PLEASE BE WEARY OF THE TAGS.

She does as much as she could to make her hospital gown look like something straight from a Gucci magazine. With that, she has her mother brush her sweet strawberry blonde hair being careful to not get the bristles twisted in her tangles. She huffs a small breath. She’s anxious. Her eyes pop out of her head and are fixed to the door when there are four loud knocks on her room door.

In peers her older brother, who smiles at his beautiful younger sister. Much too young to be confined to a hospital bed with wires attached to every part of her body. She smiles back but it’s as shaky as her hands and heartbeat.

“He’s here if you’re ready,” her brother says. She gulps.

“I don’t think I could ever be ready,” she speaks through a happy sigh. Her mother stops brushing her hair, stands up and is heading towards the door. “Would it be alright if I had another minute to compose myself?”

“Ya know, I don’t think he cares too much what you look like,” her brother laughs. 

And yes, it’s so true. Why would one of the biggest popstars in the entirety of music history care what she looks like. She’s a fleshy skeleton. And so is he. Just she’s a bit too skinny for anyone’s eyes. As she thought anyway.

She says, “I just need a minute.”

That minute goes faster than any other of the millions of minutes she’s had in this hospital. Hopefully it’ll be soon that she escapes this unforgiving death trap she’s in.

There’s a few more knocks on the door, this time three. She hasn’t taken her eyes off the door since it first opened but she’s still startled. There’s a faint figure in the frosted window that she can see, and she’s suddenly more nervous than she ever was before.

“Um,” she starts, “Come in…”

And he does, with that gigantic smile she’s seen before in the old interviews, in concerts, in photos. Her body is so tense and she can hear the sound of her rapid heartbeat in the monitor next to her. It’s almost frightening.

“Hello there,” he grins.

It took weeks for this moment to happen, and to be frank she didn’t think she’d live to see the day. But with such a gentle heart, she’s not surprised that Harry Styles made the promise to visit her in her hospital bed even after years of being an inactive popstar. 

Her heart warms when he sits beside her in the same chair her mother was in not too long before. She looks at him with her eyes soft and lips teetering into a smile. She cuts her stare short when she realises she’s glaring him down a bit too long for comfort.

“Hi.” she whispers as she blushes horridly. Harry only laughs. 

“You were a lot more jubilant on Twitter, should I say,” he speaks. “Come on, give me that knock knock joke you tweeted at me again.”

“Oh no, I can’t…”

Harry smiles. “You know you want to.”

She lets her body relax slightly as she starts to whisper out the few lines to her horrible knock knock joke. She wonders if Harry had seen her other tweets before the one he replied to six months ago. The exact knock knock joke she’s pushing out of her mouth right now. And it struggles to keep a straight face on Harry.

 “You know,” Harry begins, “It’s so hard to find a new joke nowadays. Well, one that makes sense anyway. I remember it made me laugh so hard that my cat hid under the bed for at least 3 days because he was so unfamiliar with my laugh.”  


She loves Harry’s tiny and unnecessary anecdotes.

“What’s your cat’s name?” she asks with interest spewing from her mouth. She loves cats. She had a gorgeous Siamese before she was admitted into hospital for treatment.  


“Monica,” Harry replies happily. “She’s a Turkish Angora. Beautiful cat.”  


“They are,” she agrees. 

“I can show you photos if you want!” he chirps, shuffling off his chair slightly and pulling out his phone from his back pocket.   


She leans over slightly to view Harry opening his photos app and scrolling through the endless amounts of photos hidden away from the rest of the world. They’re probably photos of his ex-bandmates, his journeys around the world, his family, his kids...

“Ooh,” he exclaims. “Here!”

He brings up a photo of this brilliantly white cat. It’s almost sore to the eyes. Her mouth falls agape as Harry flicks through the pictures of his cat. Behind each picture is a story, and he tells them. 

“She learned how to fetch one of her toys here. Couldn’t believe my eyes that she actually did it. Must have learned from one of our dogs,” Harry giggles. And there’s a video of it too proving that he did not infact stuff a toy into his pet’s mouth for the sake of the photo.

As he’s flicking through more of the photos, the stream of pictures of Monica finally end. Instead, a photo of him and Louis lights up his screen. One of them together by the River Thames with Louis goring at a curried egg sandwich. She cringes.

“He looks way too happy to be eating egg.”  


A baffled look crosses Harry’s face. “Curried egg is the best--”

“How do you like it? It tastes so... wrong. And creamy?”  


“That’s the best part about it!” Harry defends. “What’s your favourite then?”  


“I’m all about jam sandwiches. Especially strawberry. Mum brings them in everyday for me since the hospital food is almost intolerable.”  


“You don’t say,” Harry laughs. She chuckles along with him but it fades out suddenly and Harry sighs coldly. “I used to bring a bag of gummy bears to Louis every day when he was in here. It would be the only thing he’d really snacked on. Other than the lasagna dinners that they serve here. He liked those.”  


She brings a smile on her face to hopefully lighten the mood. “Those are quite good. Too bad they’re on the menu once a week.”

“Should file a complaint,” Harry tells. “You and me. The Dream Team. We can change this hospital and its food for the better good.”  


“Sounds excellent.”  


Despite the sudden change in atmosphere from the photo, Harry keeps flicking through. The next is one of Harry’s new pair of boots on the wet London pavement. One further along was a photo of Louis lounging on an ottoman at their house, reading the newspaper with a disgruntled look on his face.

Harry remembers this day too well. “He was quite unhappy that a column about a local pop band was a lot smaller than a column about a dog being rescued from the river.”

And it keeps going. Photo after photo. Pictures of Harry, pictures of Louis. Of the cat, their dogs, their kids, their families. The stories are forever going. And she doesn’t mind. She listens and hears things that no one else would ever hear. She hears the stories that never made the interviews, the columns. She hears the sound of Louis’ voice in a way she’s never heard it in real life.

At one point, Harry stops the slideshow and says, “As much as I would love to say that I’m the most interesting person alive showing off my husband and kids like an overachieved parent, I should prob--”

“I don’t mind,” she jumps in. “I love hearing your stories.” 

“You’re making me sound like a grandparent. Not that old yet.”  


She giggles. “I love hearing them.”

He sends her a warming smile and continues as if he never cut himself off. Tells her story upon story, answering her every question. Showing Louis off in a way that makes her even more proud of him than she was before. There was a video of him singing loudly in the kitchen while they were making eggplant pizzas. A photo of the both of them at Disneyland in front of the Sleeping Beauty castle. She absolutely loves it.

Their love story gave her so much confidence when it was released to the public. With hearing so much detail about Harry and Louis now, she could only wish she’ll see the day where she could find the girl of her dreams and marry her until the grave too. But all in all, she’s ecstatic to hear someone so full of love and happiness talk about another person in such a way. Humans are a wonderful kind.

She pauses the slideshow by pointing at one of the photos and speaking to Harry.

“Wow,” she breathes. 

“I know.” 

Harry zooms in on Louis’ face. A photo of him standing by the Big Buddha in Koh Samui. He looks golden and ever so happy. 

“It was the day I proposed to him.”

And he flicks to the next photo. Where Louis was under Harry’s arm, eyes squinted with tears in the corners, a brilliant ring so prominent on Louis’ finger. 

She smiles, unable to contain it seeing one of her idols so happy. “He looks so… content.”

Harry gleams. “He was.”

The sudden turn in atmosphere happened again. At least this time, she felt a lot more comfortable in it. Like it was an accepted tone to have in the room. She was relaxed with Harry beside her. And she knows that he’s the same. So she asks appropriately but solemnly.

“Was he afraid to die?”

Harry’s eyes are fixed to the photo. There’s a soft quirk in the left corner of his mouth before he answers. “He wasn’t.”

She’s surprised, but not by much. She always knew Louis was carefree, always the best in understanding that things around him happen for a reason. But it takes time to grasp something like that. She knows. She’s exactly the same.

“He was afraid of leaving me behind, leaving his sisters and brother, our kids,” Harry continues. “But he wasn’t afraid to die.”

Harry looks up to her and softens his eyes. She blinks slowly and then stares into her crumpled bed sheets, particularly upset.

“He would always tell me to stay positive. And I would find every bit of me to stay positive about certain things in the world. It’s hard at first. Too hard once Louis found out he was terminal. The last few days by his bed were the days where things got a bit easier, but that’s me saying it lightly. I didn’t leave his room for the last 48 hours. I was too afraid to.

“Before he got too weak to talk he would always make light of what he was going to do up in the clouds, still making jokes about him even though it was fairly inappropriate to anyone else but myself and him. He always stayed positive. Always.

“And god it was hard to keep a promise to him. To say that I would stay positive after his death. When it got easier, I never thought it would get as hard as it did before. But it did. And it was so hard of a promise to keep. But time is the key to a broken heart. And the positivity? I bring it with me everywhere.”

She sighs and lets a tear fall to her bed sheets. Harry takes her hand and asks her to look at him, even through the tears pooled at her eyes. 

“It’s okay to be afraid,” he says to her. “But I can promise you something. Your family, friends, they’ll never forget you. They love you. So much. Much more than your little heart might be able to handle. It gets easier, somehow.”

She takes the words in straight to her heart. She nods, swallowing the lump in her throat and lets her head fall back down to look at the sheets. 

“Life goes on,” she whispers meekly. 

“And on,” Harry adds. “And on.”

Their hands are still warm together and she’s grateful for it. She listens to her heart beat on the monitor, beeping steadily as a resting rate. She lets the rest of her tears fall before she begins to speak again. 

“I hope I get reincarnated as a cat.”

Harry chuckles gleefully. “So do I.”

She rests easily into her pillow behind her and looks up at Harry once more, seeing that he’s staring back at her with that laugh hidden in his teeth. She has never felt so in peace with someone that’s not her family. Never felt so at home in a hospital bed.

She closes her eyes briefly as she relaxes into her pillow. She can hear Harry shuffling around in his chair to put his phone back into his pocket, never removing their hands. There’s a soft click at the door. She assumes that it’s her mother checking on how the two are doing. Then, another click - the door is closed again. The two remain alone in the room. She sighs again but blithely. 

She’s not afraid anymore.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Kudos would be lovelyyyyyy


End file.
